Darpa renews Luxtera's transciever contract

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.  Luxtera Inc. has been awarded a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Electronic and Photonic Integrated Circuits (EPIC) program to continue development of photonic transceivers.

The $5 million, phase-two contract covers two-thirds of the costs of extending research into 40-Gbit/s photonic transceivers over 18 months. Luxtera will provide one-third of the research funds.

Darpa's EPIC program seeks to develop a bidirectional transceiver that could be controlled dynamically, without external thermal control. The target for phase II is to move to full integration of lasers on a CMOS chip, and to insure the design will scale to aggregate speeds of 100 Gbits/s, which will be the goal for EPIC Phase III.

The optical links developed in the HPCS program were shown at last year's Supercomputing 2005 show.
Next week at Supercomputing 2006 in Tampa, Fla., Luxtera and Sun will show greater integration of laser sources and modules on line cards.

Dickinson said EPIC sponsorship has helped accelerate supercomputing applications. One reason is that EPIC and HPCS are both sponsored by Darpa.